BrightonSEO 2018 Recap

It was my first time ever visiting beautiful Brighton, England. First time ever-ever attending BrightonSEO, the largest Search Marketing conference in the UK, attended by more than 3500 professional marketers from all around the world. But most importantly, it was my first time ever-ever-ever speaking at such an amazing conference – and I’m honored to share an overview with you.

BrightonSEO began in a room above a small pub. Then, it was a simple get together of SEO and search marketing professionals… and throughout the years it just got BIGGER. Bigger venue, bigger expos, tons of super-professional speakers and online marketers who are willing to travel from half a world away to take their seat in Brighton.

This year, the conference was held on Friday, April 27th. Here’s my recap of some of the most interesting sessions and takeaways:

Content Marketing:

Marcus Tober- Out with the Old, In with the Niche: Content for the Moments that Matter

Schema use is different from one industry to another. It is clear that each industry uses many schemas, rather than divorcing old ones and dating just one. We also see different niche use of videos in different industries. Some strategies to help you get started:

Specialization in your niche is super important. You can’t be relevant to everyone. Marcus gave a nice example of about.com. They’ve rebranded their content with different domains and managed to survive with visuals, appealing content, and by serving the user’s intent.

Eleni Cashell- How to Unleash the Power of Unique Content

“29% of all web content is duplicated… you may have it on a deeper niche on your site – but you’ve got it.”

Long content, which is both unique and valuable, is the most rewarding content you should have on your site. If you use PRs/Product descriptions/freelancers or guest posts – these are all techniques that might mean you end up with duplicate content.

Always use canonical tags. Make them your best friend.

You can identify duplicate content through google.com/copysacape/search operators. Clean up all the duplicate content, and find the troublemaker content pieces, Assemble your team: SEO, Sales, content and anybody who can be your POC for reaching “content duplicators” you are working with.

Sam Marsden: Cut the Crap, Running Content Audits with Crawlers.

Sam from DeepCrawl explained how you can create a content audit with DeepCrawl software using all data controls you can add via the tool. At the very end, you should be left with pages that perform best on your site, and which you’d like to keep. All the rest of the pages can usually be taken down – either update and rewrite or remove completely combine or convert.

Here’s a really interesting point: Readers are more likely to have time on weekends to consume content, so you might want to publish your content during the weekends and test how it works for you.

Working with SEO In-House:

I had the pleasure to speak about my own 10 years of SEO experience working with various of corporate companies – check out my slides here.

Q&A Session:

The most interesting part of the day was Aleyda Solis talking with John Mueller about search.

John spoke about mobile-first indexation and whether B2B companies, which have less mobile traffic, need to invest time optimizing for mobile. John’s answer was a definitive “Yes”, you must optimize your mobile experience. It’s a classic chicken-egg scenario: until you have a proper mobile UX, you won’t gain mobile traffic.

SEMrush did a really amazing job (as always!!), having most of the takeaways in one fantastic SlideShare. Check this out:

Final words:

SEO will never die. It’s just getting stronger and smarter and is one of the main cores of the digital marketing specs. BrightonSEO is definitely worth the trip. Looking forward to next year!

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Liraz Postan

Liraz is an international SEO and content expert, helping brands and publishers grow through search engines.
She is Outbrain's former SEO and Content Director and previously worked in the gaming, B2C and B2B industries for more than a decade.